17 Things You Didn't Know About Wikipedia

Thirteen years ago, tracking down information meant effort—hitting the library stacks, grabbing a dusty set of Britannicas, or digging out the World Book CD-Rom that came with your green iMac. It was an age of darkness.

Then came Wikipedia. Casting light onto the world with instantly accessible and free information for all, Wikipedia has grown from internet upstart—and punchline—to one of the Internet's most trusted destinations of reliable information on media, geography, diseases...pretty much anything you want to research. Edited by the collective hive mind of anyone with a computer, editions in almost every language have made it popular in hundreds of countries.

But how much do you actually know about Wikipedia itself? Of course, you could just go meta and Wikipedia Wikipedia—it's a verb now—or browse the "Criticism of Wikipedia" page, but who has time to read a 24,000 word encyclopedia entry? Instead, here're 17 quick and dirty facts you didn't know about Wikipedia.

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9. Article vandalism usually reverts in around five minutes. So unless you get really unlucky, it’s pretty good for settling bets.

10. According to Business Insider, two Wikipedia employees used to have a side project: accepting cash for favorable edits for their clients.It wasn't good. They call this practice “sanitizing reviews.”

11. One of its co-founders left in 2002. His name is Larry Sanger (above) and he left Wikipedia because he said it was overrun by trolls and wasn’t credible enough.

12. In 2006, 1,800 articles were being added daily. Now it’s flattened to around 800. Eventually they’re going to cover pretty much everything. Given thisexists, it's hard to think there's anything left.

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15. Wikipedia actually started from another “Pedia.” Wikipedia came from Nupedia, also founded by Jimmy Wales (still Wiki's CEO) and Sanger. It had a very formal editing process, unlike its predecessor. It's dead, but Sanger's new site Citizendium is still another Wikipedia alternative.